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As my thesitation takes me onto wobbly territory in the realm of what is commonly called “women’s history,” this seems an apt time to start to work out some of my own investments in that realm. The recent kerfuffle about one “Mercurius Rusticus” and his misogynistic blurt lets me know that, whatever progress has been made, the field remains vexed, and that those of us who are engaged in it had better stay engaged — and pay close attention to how we formulate that engagement.
First, some slightly irritated ground-clearing in response to two stupid questions. Please note that I use “women’s history” here largely as a signpost for “histories of the subaltern”: because I do not wish to speak to that of which I know nearly nothing, I stick to “women” and “gender.” But I have a feeling what I will say here and in future posts may apply to other areas as well.
To the question, “Why does women’s history matter?” I respond easily that I have yet to hear a convincing argument for why it doesn’t matter, and that to challenge any category of historical analysis is to challenge the historical endeavor itself. Why does history matter? is an important question, but if “history matters” can be taken as a given, “women’s history matters,” “military history matters,” “culinary history matters,” “the history of imperialism matters,” and every other formulation, easily follow. The more interesting questions are, “how can we do women’s history?”, “where will women’s history take us, as historians, as literaturians, as educators?”, “how is women’s history different from any other history?”, and so on. Crucially: “What is the difference between ‘women’s history’ and ‘gender history’?” To this last I hope to return in a later post.
To the argument that those who are engaged in the history of women, of gender, and of the family are sapping energy from other areas, I respond easily, “What the hell are you smoking?” Every creative act committed means that a range of others were not committed in that moment, with that energy. The cynical way to see it is that arithmetic progress entails geometric loss. This is the fundamental principle behind the impossibility of a Key to All Mythologies: no one can do everything, and every mythos that gets recorded eats up some time that could have gone to the others. If you find a solution to this problem, please give Doctor Causaubon a call; I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.
There are overtilled fields — many areas of Shakespeare studies and the American Civil War provide prime examples. A great deal of ink gets spilled producing largely unoriginal accounts of this or that. Yet the accusation to be levelled in that case is, precisely, of unoriginality, not of inutility.
The vast lacunae in the histories of women and of gender indicate that they will not approach supersaturation any time soon – not within my lifetime, anyhow. Scholars of early modern western Europe, for example, have only just begun, in the past ten years or so, to look for means to discover significant literacy rates for women of all classes. How women read, what they read, which women read, under what circumstances, to what purpose, and why any of this was so, are all open questions in the field of early modern studies. This is only one example. Because much of women’s political and creative agency took its roots in private or domestic spaces, in the informal economy, in manuscript rather than in print, through influence and string-pulling rather than through public action, their lives and the significance of their lives must be sought by means to which traditional historiography was never suited. Those means are not always obvious, the archive is often obscure, the problems vexed and multifaceted and their solutions roundabout.
In some ways, the unobviousness of gender history, of gendered historiography, is what makes it thrilling for its practitioners. Unobviousness is one place to which women’s history can take us: it enables us to question our assumptions about the nature of a given historical problem and about the materials by which we wish to assess that problem. Simply put, doing women’s history keeps us on our toes — a position especially necessary for wee mouse here.
There will be more on this. I am, for reasons obvious to my longtime readers, especially interested in how the historical and literary disciplines intersect in the “women’s history” enterprise. To be investigated.
Readers, your thoughts?
Okay, enough of this depressing post at the head of my blog. Because, as my friend the Puffin notes, this work matters very much indeed.
Some of you may have twigged to the fact that I’m a little addle-brainedly obsessed with books. For the nonce, I am particularly obsessed with one particular book, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what it’s doing or how to write about it.
I have written before about my tendency to get mired in Big Questions, usually a tremendous problem, especially for a wee little ‘phyte like me. However, this time my big question is devilishly simple and beguilingly pretty, so I am going to indulge myself, and ask you to enable my self-indulgence. Posing questions on this blog has gone well once before, so I ask another:
What is a book?
No, really. What is a book? What do books do? How different are they from script, and why does this difference matter? What do books mean to you? Why do you spend time with books? Why do we sit idly by at the movies and watch thousands of human beings get mown down, while (pace Dance) if we catch so much as a whiff of a burning book, our hearts break and we begin to wail and gnash our teeth?
This question is more rife for the earlies and medievalists out there, and brings back that other big question about the past and its alterity, and what we can learn from it. My attitudes about books have certainly changed dramatically since I started playing with very old ones. But I want to hear from everyone.
Really. What is a book?
My infatuation with Thomas More continues. I’ve spent much of this week in the rare book room at the British Library — ohhh, glory. Musty, delicate glory in fine secretary black-letter (thank you, Master Rastell). More on this later.
For now, a belated Despondent Humanist instalment. Nobody else likes them, but I do. So they stay.
Further to my last post, good reader, riddle me this: why is it that I cannot, absolutely cannot, encounter anything to do with More’s eldest and favorite daughter, Margaret, without weeping my bloody eyes out? The biographies are cheesy propaganda — still, I weep. I’ve read his last letter to her at least a dozen times. Still, I weep. Monday in the café, over my yogurt and coffee, weeping. Today in the reading room near closing time, typing my notes, weeping. Why?
I reproduce that final letter in full after the jump.
I have been tagged by everyone and then some for the “Seven Random Things” meme. As I have already done not one but two bits-and-pieces sorts of meme, I’m going to take this one in a new direction. Because I am a neophyte, and because this blog is becoming more and more a learning space, I am abandoning the rules and the tagging, and instead am going to write seven questions for my readers. I hope you will post responses to any one or several of them either in comments, or if you are insanely inspired, in posts of your own.
1. For those of you working in early periods: So. How do you feel about the Past? What does it mean to you to encounter things that are old? Do you fall on a particular side of the irreparable-alterity/abiding-familiarity debate? Do you think that debate is nonsense? Especially if you work on something not obviously, blatantly political: how do you think about the political value of what you do? When did you first discover History? What drew you to it?
2. For those of you to whom work in archives and rare book / manuscript collections is central: recall your first experience of these spaces and these materials. What was it like? What did you learn? If, from where you stand now, you could communicate something to the You who first encountered these things, what would it be?
3. For those of you who are interested in performance, or who are yourselves performers: how do you relate performance to your academic lives? Has your thinking about performance shaped or changed the way you conceive of yourself as a scholar? There are obvious links between performance and teaching, but less talked about are the links between performance and participation in academic communities outside the classroom, and especially undiscussed is the relationship of the activity of performance to research and writing. Thoughts?
4. Who (or what) was the object of your first intellectual crush? Do you stand by that adoration today, or are you still trying to find a way to erase that moment from history?
5. Adjunct Whore gets an opt-out on this one, since I’ve already asked her, but for the rest of you: is there a famous text, school of thought, theory, that is extremely hip in or vital to your field, that you are Expected to Know, but that you, to your shame and/or puzzlement, haven’t read, don’t understand, are completely unimpressed with, or simply fear? Of course there is. What is it?
6. If you could change, radically change, one major thing about your field, what would it be, and why?
7. Tell me about your marginalia. (This sounds like a come-on, and I like it that way.) What do you write in books? If your notes were in an alphabet that I don’t read, what sort of shapes would I see framing the pages? Do you prefer symbolic diagrams (arrows, tick-marks, underlining, etc) or verbal notes? Would anyone who is not you understand them? Are they fully integrated with the text they limn, or could they stand alone?
Inquiring minds want to know. (Inquiring minds also want to procrastinate — help a girl out here.)
In the past year, I have fallen in love on at least three occasions. As it usually goes in my life, these loves have taken as their objects not people (with all their flaws, their insecurities, their needs, and their demands on my heart and my time), but books. I fall for the content, I fall for the physical object, I fall in love with the love itself.
In a rare twist of fate, this time I have also fallen — utterly, irreparably, reader, fallen for the author of those three books, one Marguerite Yourcenar. Quick slap in the face for you self-satisfied Anglophones: Yourcenar is one of the great dames of French letters (there are about ten of them; they’re easy to keep track of), the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française (there have only been four, of whom three are still sitting), and the author, most famously, of Mémoires d’Hadrien and L’Œuvre au noir, two of my love-objects. Hadrien is just what it sounds like. L‘Œuvre is a remarkable sweep of sixteenth-century Europe, through the biography of one Zénon, iconoclast and alchemist. Both are generically and topically historical novels whose style and philosophical impulses are fundamentally modern. A third suitor for my affections, Alexis, ou le traité du vain combat, is discounted because it makes me angry that Yourcenar wrote it when she was just a bit older than I am now, and I deem that Unfair. (I keep a poster of the famous portrait of Virginia Woolf at twenty on my wall to remind me that she did not publish anything of real value until she was past forty.)
The current affair concerns Yourcenar’s memoirs, Le labyrinthe du monde — or at least the first volume of them, Souvenirs pieux. This volume also happens to be the clincher in my Author Love complex. My wildest amours (with living beings as well as books and dead beings) generally evolve from what I call a brain-crush. If I have a crush on you, reader, it is likely because I find your mind unbearably elegant. It is also likely that much of the elegance I find there is mysterious to me, and therefore all the more attractive. There is nothing sexier than a puzzle.
I am in love with Yourcenar’s mind. I am in love with its historical turn. Reading Souvenirs pieux, I see immediately the impulses that guided her to write historical fiction, or were perhaps shaped by her prior inclination toward historical topics. I mean “history” here in its simplest sense: the notion that objects, individuals, people, have a past and that that past matters. That things come from somewhere, and cannot be addressed without addressing the problem of their provenance.
She writes, describing her own first days, in her mother’s room, where she was born (and where her mother died of fever a few days after her birth):
Cette fillette vieille d’une heure est en tout cas déjà prise, comme dans un filet, dans les réalités de la souffrance animale et de la peine humaine; elle l’est aussi dans les futilités d’un temps, dans les petites et grandes nouvelles du journal que personne ce matin n’a eu le temps de lire, et qui gît sur le banc du vestibule, dans ce qui est de mode et dans ce qui est de routine. Au haut de son berceau se balance une croix d’ivoire orné d’une tête d’angelot que par une suite de hasards presque dérisoires je possède encore. L’objet est banal: pieux bibelot qu’on a mis là parmi des nœuds de ruban presque aussi rituels, mais qu’auparavant Fernande a probablement fait bénir. L’ivoire provient d’un éléphant tué dans la forêt congolaise, dont les défenses ont été vendues à bas prix par des indigènes à quelque trafiquant belge. Cette grande masse de vie intelligente, issue d’une dynastie qui remonte au moins jusqu’au début du Pléistocène, a abouti à cela. Ce brimborion a fait partie d’un animal qui a brouté l’herbe et bu l’eau des fleuves, qui s’est baigné dans la bonne boue tiède, qui s’est servi de cet ivoire pour combattre un rival ou essayer de parer aux attaques de l’homme, qui a flatté de sa trompe la femelle avec qui il s’accouplait. L’artiste qui a façonné cette matière n’a su en faire qu’une bondieuserie de luxe: l’angelot censé représenter l’Ange Gardien auquel l’enfant croira un jour ressemble aux Cupidons joufflus fabriqués eux aussi en série par des tâcherons gréco-romains.
There are those curious “hasards dérisoires” — personal history reduced to quasi-absurd happenstance. There is the self-consciousness of the woman looking back on the infant girl who is “déjà prise” — taken, held, stuck, trapped, snatched, entangled (our blessed tongue requires so many iterations for what that tiny French participle accomplishes). There is the violent shift from the banality of a religious trifle to the death of the elephant, the colonial market, the dominance of earth and animals by men. There is the nod to the artisan, and the rejection of his trivial craft. And the last, sudden, astonishing shift to the Greco-Roman “tâcherons,” there, it seems, simply to signify that no distance, historical or otherwise, is so great as to destroy the extraordinary chain of correspondences Yourcenar establishes among things and persons in the world around her infant self.
She goes on to describe the female laborers who have painstakingly crafted the linens on which she was born, in which she was swaddled — the women, badly paid and badly treated, who enter into a system of exchange with another female figure, the boutiquière who sells their crafts in turn to the prosperous Monsieur de C., Yourcenar’s father, who will in turn gift them to his wife, Fernande. No object in these memoirs is innocent, no item or persona or aside left undisturbed by the author’s roving imagination.
For these are, after all, imagined histories. As she details the history of her mother’s family, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century in quasi-feudal Gueldre, she says straight out that certain of the details, while certainly not lost, would require “plus de recherches que ces précisions n’en valent.” Like the dizzying zoom-effect that conjectures simple objects into grand historical life, the conjectural sketches of Yourcenar’s ancestors bear witness to the mind of the novelist at work. I understand, suddenly, why the distant, hardly apprehensible subjects of her two greatest novels; why the peculiar, winding and frequently detouring narrative of each. I understand why all the forces of Renaissance European history seem to coalesce around Zénon’s head, why Yourcenar chose a pensive scholar-emperor for her classical opus.
In Yourcenar’s world, everything is historical, in that simplest sense of the importance of the past, and the artist’s duty is to make that apparent, and make it beautiful. I am in love with this woman’s mind.
